Performing Truth: Reconfiguration of ‘The Mousetrap’ in Karmayogi and Hemanta

Abstract

Shakespeare’s Hamlet explores the intertwined themes of revenge, indecision, deception and the protagonist’s pursuit of truth. He employs the distinctive dramatic device of play-within-the-play to depict Hamlet’s attempt to seek the truth regarding the circumstances of his death. Appearing in Act III, Scene II of the play, this play-within-the-play is popularly known by the metaphorical name the Mousetrap, owing to the narrative function it performs as Hamlet seeks to trap the truth of King Claudius’s involvement in his father’s murder. Cinematic adaptations of Hamlet reconfigure this device according to the cultural and aesthetic contexts in which the play is received and reinterpreted. This paper examines the reconfiguration of the Mousetrap in two cross-cultural Indian cinematic adaptations of Hamlet in the twenty-first century: V. K. Prakash’s Malayalam film Karmayogi (2012) and Anjan Dutt’s Bengali film Hemanta (2016). The paper draws upon Linda Hutcheon’s theory of adaptation and Gérard Genette’s concept of the palimpsest and explores how the play-within-the-play device is retained in the films while altering its cultural and aesthetic expression. The paper argues that the multifarious representations of ‘the Mousetrap’ demonstrate the inclination of the cinematic adaptation to negotiate Shakespeare’s classic dramatic conventions in culture-specific forms that result in new interpretations and culturally situated versions of Shakespeare.